Forum Spying
The forums should not be a way to avoid affiliations with PCs while spying or performing other covert actions.
If you are spying for faction A on faction B, you should not be:
Sending letters on the forums with this information without ever actually meeting the recipient in game.
Reading faction B's forum and copy-pasting large quantities information onto faction A's forum without giving any clue to such in game.
Acting perfectly relaxed about it all without any ranks in bluff.
Any combination of the above.
If you are playing a spy-type character, you should be meeting up with your handler(s) in game and when members of the faction you are acting against are logged in.
Be reasonable in copying text from faction forums too. Remember these are like files stored somewhere IC and would take time to copy. Perhaps carry around a note with a description explaining it is a copy of a report from faction B and hand it to the people you are spying for in game.
Bottom line: Don't abuse the forums for anonymity! When spying you can certainly use them to transfer this information, but it should be reflected fairly in game.

Executions
The City of Arabel follows a code of law that is enforced by a City Militia and Judges. In some cases these militiamen could be PC's and a caught criminal could be one as well, depending on the gravity of a crime, the militiamen could assign punishments or call for a trial in order to judge whether or not the caught criminal should go through a more severe punishment (exile or even execution).
Executions are not done by DMs unless:
It warrants an immediate and harsh decision based on gameplay.
The Judiciary verdicts a sentence of death.
Rules on executed characters:
Once a character has been executed, they are retired permanently, unless their corpse is recovered.
The character MAY get raised if their body is recovered, or they MAY Whitelight.
If the character is raised, they will be placed as hostile against all area guards within Arabel and Cormyrian controlled settlements (Exception: Old Town)
Any character who is uncover to have assisted in their raise, will be also placed on hostile to the peace official factions.
A executed character may respawn after two weeks after being executed, with DM approval.
A executed character will have none of their previous gear or supplies.
Players may execute other PCs without a DM present, but they must have DM approval to do so.
Players may kill raised executed PCs without a DMs approval, since they were executed.
The Judiciary should be thinking in terms of simple and fair Justice, not ACLU-American sit in Jail for 15 years waiting for 15 appeals Justice before execution. It is clearly not an "anti-capital punishment" society, but neither do we want to create a Hammurabic Code Justice. We want a simple and even-handed sense of Justice, with room for character personality, bribing, Noble influence, and such to take place as long as the characters involved remain in the heart of Role Playing.
Mind you, that breaking the law for "Good" characters usually bears the same Justice that an "Evil" character bears. There is no difference really between someone who stabs a guard to rob him, or stabs a guard because they spit on him and don't want to be arrested. For the guard, he still got stabbed!!! Let's not get lost in the context of intent for now. Let's just focus on "the law is the law". To be fair to both evil and good players, there is a certain amount of equal distribution that must be given. It is highly unfair for the server and the judicial system to let "Good" characters get away with stuff because they are "good".
However, if intent can be proven to be lethal for one case, and not the other, then it is possible and most likely that the sentences will differ. Be sure that the DMs monitor the Judicial system carefully to ensure that no OOC favors are being done by any party. You the players are the Judges and the prosecutors, the defense councils, and the law-breakers! We only provide an atmosphere in which you can play. The other part we control are the Lords and nobles who oversee some of this, which our intent is to provide for you a certain level of persuasion based on character personalities and situational ethics.
Further explanation why we have these rules:
If you played a PC guard, and the person you just spent oodles of hours putting behind bars just gets up and walks away from a raise without any consequences, what is the point of playing or being a guard, or for that matter being executed?
If there were no other consequences to killing guards and doing whatever you wanted in front of them, then law in itself would be useless to enforce.
Because of the mechanical limitations on the game, and the lack of 24/7 DM presence, this measure is to give a little credit to "reality" and the fact that your characters actions have real and reasonable consequences for their actions in a generally good and law abiding civilization such as Arabel.
We are not punishing the player. The intent is to provide the player an opportunity to continue to play their character, but to do so in an environment that was created by their character's actions.

Item Transfer
Item transferring is a bannable offense. It doesn't matter if you transfer a healing kit or a Fullplate +2. At the very least, it will result in deletion of all your characters and this include your friend's character should they be taking part in an in-direct item transfer. It's not worth it, so don't do it. This include gold transfer, leaving loot on the ground either directly on the ground and in chests/faction storage/monster corpses, leaving killed monster corpses/hides for your other PCs to collect from, using a friend IG as an indirect transfer. Just don't do it.
Old player characters in possession of powerful equipment SHALL NOT transfer that equipment to other characters. This goes for any powerful DM loot or old gear which has been re-balanced, but use your common sense. We will take a particularly dim view of anything we see as a deliberate attempt to get such equipment into circulation on the cheap or for free. It is also include logging in old characters with extremely powerful items and selling them en masse.

NPC Griefing
Killing a non hostile NPC (animals aside) without explicit DM permission is considered NPC griefing, and may get you banned. The DM team don't care if you think your character had the best of reasons. If a DM is not there to judge if you can do it and/or if any of the thousands of people that are not represented by NPCs sees you or not, don't do it, period.
Remember, you don't get to judge if the NPCs (represented or not in the game) react to your actions or not and how. And also, the NPCs aren't there for you to kill for XP or anything else, but to give ambience to the game. Don't be surprised if you kill a commoner without checking with a DM first and the next thing you see is the fugue plane loading.

Griefing
Griefing is any sort of pestering attack, be it verbal, in game actions, or otherwise that seeks to anger, or annoy to a degree of retaliation.
All accusations of griefing need to come to the DM team through DM channel, IRC or PMs. If no DM is available contact us via an email at cityofarabel@gmail.com please include screenshots of actions the person in question had against you.
Note that no where in the paragraph above does it say to, handle the griefer yourself, make public rants in IRC or on the Forums, or telling the person they are a griefer and making direct accusations towards them.
Plain and simply put, if you feel you have been griefed, you contact the DM team. If I catch you publicly making accusations, then heed this as your warning: you will be banned from the medium you made that accusation from, due to the fact that it is an immature, ineffective, and rather stupid way to get a problem dealt with. We will handle any griefers for sake of fairness and sanity, not you.
Note: the first thing you should do when you are griefed is not to run to the guards, but saving your logs/screenshots and writing the email.
Guards are players who applied to play a character, they have not applied to handle griefers and are not equipped to deal with them.